


I love your bones

by thewindupbird



Series: I love your bones [1]
Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-08
Updated: 2017-11-14
Packaged: 2019-01-31 01:26:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12665454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewindupbird/pseuds/thewindupbird
Summary: “I gotta be honest, man, I don’t know if I can go home by myself tonight.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work of fiction and is in no way meant to depict the real lives of any persons involved.
> 
> This comes from a place of love. Let's boogie, boys!

“I— I gotta be honest, man, I don’t know if I can go home by myself tonight.”

Shane laughs, wheezing softly. He should have known Ryan wasn’t joking before he even looks over at him in Ryan’s little car — the one Shane has to fold his long legs and arms into like it’s some ridiculous roller coaster at a fair that he is too tall to ride. They are stopped in L.A. traffic, even at this time of night, rain just _pounding_ down on the roof, washing the windows into wavering white and red lights from the other cars, the streetlamps, the neon signs. And he can see, now, that Ryan is dead serious. Somehow that makes it even funnier. “Oh no,” he says, pitching his voice in that soft, overly-theatric tone he has when he was _absolutely_ talking shit. “Are you afraid the _demons_ might get you?” He asks. “Are they hiding under your bed, just waiting for you to tuck yourself in for the night?”

“Fuck you, Shane,” Ryan says, laughing in that way he has that means that he’s finding it funny despite himself, but the fear is just on the edge of overriding it. “Fuck— I’m really— I’m serious, my mind’s going to fucking melt if I have to go sit in there alone.”

“Well, what?” Shane asks, as they move forward, only to stop again just a few feet ahead. Ryan’s eyes are on the traffic in front of them, but he isn’t seeing it. Shane can see his gaze flickering here and there, imaging just what might be in his apartment, what might have followed him back from the creepy forest they’d just been in. “You want me to come in with you, turn on all the lights, stick around while you check all the nooks and crannies?”

“I dunno, yeah, maybe!” Ryan says, looking over at him and catching his eyes. “Fuck, I dunno. It’s creepy there at night. I try not to do research there, if I can avoid it.” And it’s true. There’s something about researching ghosts and grisly murders in the brightly lit office at Buzzfeed that is completely different from his cramped apartment, and all the weird noises it seems to make only after dark.

“Oohh, spooky,” Shane says. “I mean— I…” he hesitates just a half-second too long, and then keeps going, talking faster as if to make up for the pause. “I have to be up for work tomorrow morning, early… I don’t— I just want to go to bed, Ryan, I really don’t want to deal with all this driving around… I haven’t even eaten since breakfast and that was fucking… sixteen hours ago,” he says, checking the clock. It’s just past midnight, now.

Ryan has gone quiet, fingers adjusting on the steering wheel in a strangely elegant little rippling movement. The silence stretches out between them. Ryan pretends to check the time, flicks the windshield wipers on faster, then slower again. Even at top speed they do little to clear the water from the windshield. Shane finds himself taking a breath, eyes on the way the light wavers through the streaming rain before he hears himself saying “Why don’t you just stay at my place? It’s closer, anyway. And at this rate, it’s going to take us almost an hour to even get _there._ I bet we could walk faster.”

“Yeah.”

“Fucking L.A. traffic.”

Ryan breathes a laugh. “Yeah.” They inch forward a little more, and he glances over at Shane. “Really?”

“What?”

“Really, I can crash?”

“Yeah, sure. But only if you let me sleep. No fucking— spirit boxing in my apartment. No talking about ghosts. Just… home. Takeout. Bed. Shower, if I’m feeling ambitious. Chinese?”

Ryan smiles again, and it is genuine this time. And something judders and loosens in Shane’s chest. “Okay.”

-

Ryan sits staring into his backpack of clothes on Shane’s living room floor. He looks like a kid opening a disappointing present on Christmas morning. They are waiting for Chinese takeout. Shane passes him on his way to drop heavily onto the couch with a soft groan. Fuck, he’s tired. He meets Ryan’s eyes as he looks up at Shane with a helpless sort of expression. “I… this is stupid. I _know you’re_ gonna think it’s stupid, but I’m really not comfortable wearing this stuff again. Here.”

Shane snorts. “What, you think it has some essence of demon on it?” he asks. “Some weird cryptid… musk.”

“Cryptid _musk_?!” Ryan wheezes as he takes the beer Shane offers him, his whole fucking face lighting up. Shane has to lean his elbows against the coffee table when he laughs too, bottle opener dangling from his hand, before he gets back to cracking his own beer open.

“Yeah,” Shane said, recovering slightly, and they both put their hands up as though visualizing a sign in the air somewhere before them. At the same time, they say “Cryptid Musk,” and Ryan just dissolves into laughter and Shane, his eyes on him, has to catch his breath before he can laugh, too.

“From Calvin Klein,” he manages setting Ryan off wheezing.

“Is that what you Bigfoots wear?” Ryan asks when he catches his breath.

“Oh will you just— shut the hell up?” Shane says. “I’m not a Bigfoot, and I don’t think that’s the correct plural—”

“It’s not.”

“Bigfeet?”

Ryan’s gone again.

-

He ends up letting Ryan shower first, lending him a shirt and sweat pants, and he throws all the clothes they’ve worn to the woods a demon supposedly calls home (according to Ghost Detective Ryan Bergara) into his piece-of-shit little washing machine that shakes through its spin cycle as though it’s fucking possessed. Ryan eventually re-emerges from the bathroom, hair wet and glasses on, with the legs of Shane’s sweatpants rolled up so much that Shane can’t help bursting into laughter as he passes him with a towel slung over his shoulder. He’s still going as Ryan shouts something about “five foot ten” from the living room just before Shane shuts the bathroom door for his own shower. The room is still steamy. He undresses and stands motionless under the hot water, pressing the heels of his hands hard against his eyes to scrub the water out, and then just leaving them there thinking _What the hell is wrong with you, Shane?_ because suddenly this feels weird, and it shouldn’t. 

Somehow it’s different being here, in this familiar space, his own apartment, with Ryan. Or, rather, it’s different being here when they are both sober and even then, they usually go to Ryan’s if he has to crash. Ryan’s is bigger and has better heating. Shane’s not really the most socially extroverted person, but he’s not an introvert either. As usual, he falls at odds with everything and just has to accept it. And his apartment isn’t the familiar space of the office where Shane knows how to act. It isn’t even the floor of some haunted place where, even if he doesn’t always know how to _be_ with Ryan, he can at least just turn on his Camera Personality instead. 

That morning all those months ago at the Dauphine, Shane had drifted from half-asleep to fully awake, with a splitting headache, and Ryan _still_ talking about those goddamn footsteps above and he’d just— it had felt weird to wake up to Ryan’s fingers, cold, wrapping around his wrist saying “Shane, I swear I heard—“ and just _endless_ theorizing after that. Ryan is so desperate, sometimes, to prove the existence of ghosts that Shane sometimes wonders whether he has space in his brain for anything fucking else. It just isn't _him_ , isn’t Shane. The way Ryan thinks isn’t how he thinks. How could two people be so different and still…

What? Work... click?

 _Opposites attract_ his brain supplies, unhelpfully. The skeptic and the believer. And Ryan _did_ believe. Maybe a little too much.

_“What if we find out that there’s actually nobody even staying above us?”_

Shane had snapped at him a little, then. More than he’d meant to. “ _I— I dunno, Ryan, this place is_ strange?”

Sometimes Shane doesn't know what Ryan is looking for. Sometimes he wonders if it's really ghosts and demons at all, or if it's just belief in… _something_. Else. Other.

Sometimes Shane wonders what he, himself, is looking for in all this. Why does he keep going on these little ghost-bustings only to ever find nothing? Why does he stand with Ryan for fifteen minutes at a time listening to meaningless static piping through a stupid little fucking box? There is the paycheck, of course. It's a great gig, aside from the late nights, but it isn't just that… it isn’t about that, actually, at all. It's something else, now.

Maybe they're both looking for something they can't admit. 

_Or maybe I’m just looking too far into this whole fucking thing_ , Shane thinks to himself, before lowering his hands, shaking water from his hair and finally actually doing what showers actually involved, as he reached for the soap. _Maybe it really is just ghosts and Ryan really is just fuckin’… nuts_.

Anyway, despite his frustration at all this fucking ghost stuff… despite Ryan keeping him up all night with his obsession with whoever's footsteps — some asshole upstairs, more than likely — someone completely flesh and bone and solid... Despite all that, Shane finds that it only takes one genuine laugh from Ryan to wipe all of his frustration and doubt away and leave him with something clean and pure and fucking _worth it_. So what does that mean?

 _Fuck_. Shane thinks, but even in his head, water streaming down around him, that word sounds disconcertingly calm. Fuck.

~*~

If Ryan was going to pinpoint the exact time things started to shift and change between them, he wouldn’t be able to. Maybe it's always been like this. It isn't like… weird or anything. He just really likes Shane. It wasn't even like it had been a slow build or anything. It was just… all of a sudden, there. He noticed it, and it was then that he started wondering when the fuck this had all started, but it was impossible to say for sure. 

And maybe, for a little while, it had felt a little bit like a crisis. This wasn’t something that he knew. Not for lack of knowledge of homosexuality, or the many friends and coworkers he had who were gay. It was more that this just wasn’t something he’d ever noticed before, in himself. This tendency towards— men. And he still— it wasn’t _men_ , necessarily. It was— it was just fucking _Shane_. 

He’d tested himself, though. He was nothing if not a detective. Maybe he was gay or bi or something, and this whole fucking world had just spun him around in the direction of “boys like girls” and so he’d just assumed that he, being a boy, should like girls too. Or maybe, he told himself, stomach in knots, he’d just never fallen for the right guy. But then— then it wasn’t like he’d _fallen_ for Shane, either. It was just… it was something else. Something that wasn’t _friends_ anymore. Not with the way his mind seemed to stutter and shut down sometimes when Shane looked at him a certain way, or when Shane laughed at his jokes and his heart fluttered around in his chest in a way that was disturbingly similar to fear, but somehow more pleasant, leaving him feeling warm and shaken, instead of like he'd been hollowed out. 

These were things Ryan wasn’t about to tell anyone. Not just yet, anyway. That he’d tried to test himself, how far this thing went. He tried to look at all his male coworkers, see what might be attractive in them… and he could do it, sure, but none of that stirred anything in him. And then Shane had walked in from a shoot, the afternoon sunlight shining through the glass doors behind him, and he’d smiled at Ryan as he passed and Ryan had had to consciously force himself to keep walking and not just slam to a stop because he’d spent all morning trying to force himself to feel something only to have that something hit him like a smack in the face as soon as he saw Shane. 

After that, he’d gone to a gay bar in a fit of madness, maybe, one Thursday night, after agonizing over this stuff alone too long at home. He'd gotten too drunk too fast. Too nervous. He’d talked with guys whose faces he couldn’t remember, danced with guys where the only thing that stood out in his mind was the press of their hips against his, and the hardness between them both because it was _dancing_ and the beat was fucking sick, and he was into that — but it didn’t mean anything and—

And he’d gone home to his empty apartment way too early the next morning (or way too late, considering the night he'd had) and showered for a really long time. Until the nausea went away and left him with a headache instead. Until the hot water made him feel cleansed, somehow, if not sated. Yeah, no. That hadn’t been his thing. So yeah. Maybe it wasn’t guys, just--...

These are the thoughts he's having now in Shane's tiny cramped bathroom, takeout eaten and two or three too many beers in and finally breaking the seal. And now, washing his hands, Ryan looks up into the mirror to meet his own slightly glazed eyes in his reflection — he’s downed that beer way too fast and finds himself reaching up and trying to fix his hair, still slightly damp from his own shower, his heart beating a little too hard and fast in his chest.

And then the laundry machine gives a giant slam like someone is pounding on it from the inside and Ryan jumps about a foot off the ground and shoots out of the bathroom, already laughing a little hysterically, breathlessly. “Dude your fucking washing machine just nearly gave me a heart attack.”

“Yeah, she’s on her last legs, maybe” Shane says from where he's sitting on the couch. He’s found something on Netflix and is half-watching it, half surfing the internet, the television sound turned low. Ryan ventures back into the room and wonders if he should sit beside Shane now, or on the spot on the floor he’s been occupying all night long. It feels weird to be in Shane’s space. He’s never realized how much he takes it for granted that he feels comfortable at home and here, he feels… sort of alien. He wonders if Shane feels the same when he comes over to his place, and then thinks, _Does Shane feel the same at all? Ever?_

 _Definitely not_ , he immediately interrupts himself, his voice sounding freakishly like Shane’s even in his own head. He’s disproving his own theories now. Shane is often impassive at the best of times, and seems perfectly content being solitary and he never really seems to look at Ryan in a way that he doesn’t look at anyone else and… and maybe he, Ryan, is just being an idiot, and he shouldn’t keep feeding into this thing if there’s no reason to. 

_Shut up, Ryan_ , he tells himself, just as Shane looks up at him from his laptop, the glare from his laptop screen reflecting in his glasses so Ryan can’t quite see the colour of his eyes.

“You want to watch something else?” Shane asks, leaning just a little more into the corner of the couch as though to invite Ryan to sit down in the middle of it.

“Sure,” Ryan shrugs, moving forwards, trying to ignore the way his heart is still skipping a little erratically. How did you know you weren’t about to have a stroke? What were the warning signs?

He glances at Shane’s laptop as he sits down — some web page page for a band — a long list of their tour dates. “Are you going?” Ryan asks.

“Eh, nah,” Shane says. “There’s only a few dates for L.A., and they fall into prime ghost-busting times.”

“Sure you don’t want to just take a vacation?” Ryan asks, and Shane laughs softly. “Well if you want me gone—” he jokes.

“Well, I mean— I— if you’re—” Ryan begins, ruining the joke by getting too serious. Yeah. He’s been down this road before…

“No,” Shane says, suddenly, picking at the label of his beer absently before finishing it off and setting it down on the coffee table. “I’d rather do Unsolved.”

“Really?” Ryan asks. Maybe fishing for the compliments, maybe just looking for reassurance because lately, he feels so fucking unsure of himself. “You’d rather sleep on a moldy dirt floor in a haunted house with me keeping you up all night, than go and see…” he takes a look at the web page again “The Peculiar Pretzelmen? Hey, is this secretly your band? You’re a pretzel-man.” He vaguely makes his own limbs all wobbly. Car dealership ballon-thing Shane.

Shane laughs a little, one corner of his mouth turning up. “Yep. My band," he says sarcastically, and then, "I guess I _would_ rather go ghost-hunting. Ugh, Ryan, what have you fucking done to me?”

It’s another joke, but Ryan finds himself catching his breath and the words are out of his mouth before he can even stop them— “What are you doing to _me_?” It’s too quiet to be a joke and Ryan’s stomach drops because he's such a fucking idiot, and Shane looks up at him and, for a moment, everything is suspended, and all Ryan can hear is Shane’s rattling washing machine in the other room, and his own pounding heart and then he swallows and thinks about kissing him— has already thought about kissing him, but now— it’s raw and solid. The moment is here, corporeal, if he just has the guts. He only has to lean forward a little.

But Ryan doesn’t move. And maybe Shane sees it all in his face, anyway, or he sees something, because he gets up fast, sort of awkwardly, his laptop clattering onto the coffee table because he didn’t have a good grip on it before it slid off of his knees. Ryan watches, frozen, as Shane kind of does a weird hop-skip step to avoid slamming his shins off of the wooden edge when he skirts the coffee table in a mix of awkwardness and elegance, then makes for the kitchen at a fucking _clip_ without looking back. “Want another beer?”

He asks this and his voice is… wrong somehow. And Ryan suddenly feels sick.

“Uh—” Ryan says, voice shaking softly, but not as much as his fingers are as he presses one hand to his forehead in a loose fist. _Fuck_. “N— yeah, sure.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> By some divine stroke of luck, I was freed from several work duties today, so I irresponsibly cranked this out instead.

In the relative safety of the kitchen, out of Ryan’s view, Shane considers everything.  
  
Maybe Shane knew where this was going: the tension between them, Ryan sitting on the floor like he wanted to be there instead of the couch, and Shane watching him fumble with the bottle opener to open his third or fourth beer in too short a time…  
  
Now, Shane crouches in front of the fridge, letting the cool air wash over him as he stares into it blankly. He’d just been thinking in the shower how it was different than usual because they were here instead of Ryan’s, because they were both sober… but now Shane’s still sober, and Ryan’s not, and Shane— Shane doesn’t know _why_ what just happened happened. And so he has fled to the kitchen like a coward. He straightens up, setting two beers on the counter, and gently kicks the fridge door shut.

Ryan thinks that Shane’s basically a robot. That he never gets scared, or feels a chill up his spine or whatever. But the truth is, right now, leaning over his counter, hands pressed into the edge, Shane’s fucking terrified. He has _no fucking idea_ what he's supposed to do. What Shane wants and what might happen if he takes it… it’s like that Rolling Stones song. Sometimes what you wanted screwed everything else up. Still, logic overrides that, and he knows he can’t just leave Ryan in his living room after… a moment like that. He can’t just stand here in his half-dark kitchen and the safety of his own thoughts just _thinking_ about it.  
  
Taking a deep breath, Shane steadies himself, grabs the beer again, and heads back out.  
  
Ryan’s back on the floor again, going through his bag absently. He doesn’t look up. Shane knows he’s not really looking for anything. He’s just searching to look like he’s doing something, and this is the only thing in this place that Ryan owns. He can’t very well just start rummaging through the odds and ends on Shane’s coffee table, or start pulling books off the shelves. And Shane realizes with a crushing kind of weight, that _he_ is like that, a reflection of his own apartment — impenetrable, unwelcoming to outsiders. And no matter how close they are as friends, Ryan still feels on the outside, when it comes down to it.  
  
It used to be that Shane could tell himself that he wanted things this way. Wanted the world a little bit at an arms length.  
  
Suddenly, he doesn’t.  
  
And if he just… _all_ he needs to do is explain that it felt too sudden, that it freaked him out. That maybe they should just— sit on the couch again, watch something they don’t really pay attention to, talk to each other instead. Shane’s heart is in his throat, and maybe that’s what makes his voice shake just a little as he says “Ryan—”  
  
“Sorry,” Ryan says, and suddenly he is smiling up at Shane, taking him aback until he sees that Ryan’s eyes are guarded. He’s embarrassed, and there’s something else there that makes Shane’s chest tight, but Ryan’s already looking away again, at the glowing screen of his phone before Shane can figure out what that look was. “I think the stress just freaked me out,” Ryan is saying, “That house was kind of fucked. I’m kind of drunk— I’m just going to take an Uber or—”  
  
Shane feels the bottom drop out of his stomach and he slowly moves forward to set the bottles down on the table. “I thought you didn’t want to go home by yourself,” he says, and his voice is strange and too quiet, and maybe even too much of a question. Ryan’s hands still slightly.  
  
“I didn’t,” Ryan says, and he has the app open on his screen, Shane can see it, but Ryan hasn’t sent his pickup location yet. “But I think—” he’s trying to backtrack, make this make sense to himself, to both of them, and he can’t, and Shane can see the struggle but he doesn’t say anything.  
  
“I just feel really weird, right now,” Ryan says, almost a whisper, and he meets Shane’s eyes again as the walls start coming down.  
  
“Don’t—” Shane tells him, willing his voice back to normal and easy. “Don’t worry about it, just—”  
  
“It’s just—” Ryan begins.  
  
“Don’t worry. I get it,” Shane interrupts. But he doesn’t.  
  
Still, relief slowly leaks into Ryan’s voice as he says “Yeah. Okay.”  
  
“I’ll find a blanket. The heat’s there,” Shane says, pointing to the dial on the wall. “You can crank it if it gets too cold out here, it— yeah. It doesn’t work very well, so.” Ryan nods, standing and for a moment, they face each other. Shane’s eyes flicker over him, then he gives him a quick smile before he skirts him, not touching, and goes into the bedroom to find things to make the couch up.

~*~

  
It’s still kind of spooky here, Ryan thinks, long after Shane’s disappeared into his own bedroom for the night, and silence has descended. The apartment isn’t as dark as Ryan’s gets at night because Shane’s curtains suck and the streetlight bleeds through. Ryan is huddled under a heavy, scratchy wool blanket that feels very Illinois somehow… or maybe he’s just insane.  
  
He’s not as drunk anymore. Actually, sobering up made the initial mortification even more horrible, but now that he’s thinking about it, it could have gone worse. _Maybe I should just say I was possessed!_ Ryan thinks, pretending without success that the thought is just a joke.  
  
The worst part isn’t that he thought about kissing him… the worst part is definitely what he’d said just before. And how much he’d meant it. If he’d just kept his stupid mouth shut, he probably _could_ have kissed Shane and then just laughed it off, somehow, like it was just whatever. Like normal dudes did that all the time. He wonders, though, if that would have been worse than this.  
  
It takes him a long time to be able to shut his mind down. The unopened beers are still sitting on the coffee table next to Shane’s laptop, a reminder of the pretty fucking disastrous end of the evening. Ryan stares at them. At least he’s not thinking about ghosts when he finally drifts off to sleep.

  
—

  
The next morning, Ryan wakes not to his alarm, but rather to Shane’s shuffling around. He opens his eyes blearily and rolls over from where he’s been facing the back of the couch to look at him, dressed in the same t-shirt and sweatpants as last night, still wearing his glasses. He’s puttering around in the kitchen making coffee, but he looks over when Ryan moves.  
  
“Hey, buddy,” Shane says, and his voice is warm and slightly hoarse and Ryan reaches up fast, pretending to rub sleep out of his eyes, but really just needing to look away. “You can crash here until you need to leave. I’ll leave you my keys.”  
  
“How’re you getting to work?” Ryan asks, already too awake.  
  
Shane shrugs, shoulders uneven, eyes on the water slowly making its way through the cone filter, into his thermos. “I’ll probably walk.”  
  
Ryan vaguely remembers this. Shane is doing sound for some video about running every morning for a month, and so he needs to be there before the shoot starts at seven. Ryan sits up, dragging the blanket around his shoulders. His eyes fall on the beer bottles again and he feels his gut clench. He swallows. “I can drive you,” he offers.  
  
“Don’t worry about it,” Shane says. He knows Ryan can sleep at least another hour or so before he has to get up. “You should probably keep sleeping it off.”  
  
Ryan doesn’t know if it’s a joke or a jab, but he laughs softly anyway, his eyes searching.

  
~*~

  
Shane is not being dismissive on purpose, but he hardly trusts himself to look at Ryan. Instead, he pours more hot water into the filter, then goes back to his room again, dressing quickly. He doesn’t bother putting his contacts in.  
  
When he comes back out, Ryan’s still sitting on the couch, huddled in the blanket, looking pretty spaced out. Shane crosses to him a little cautiously and picks up the bottles from the coffee table so he can put them back in the fridge. His eyes fall on Ryan’s dark hair, the line of his cheekbone. “You okay, man?”  
  
“Yeah,” Ryan says, like a question, but Shane thinks he’s telling the truth. Then Ryan looks up at him.  
  
“Okay,” Shane says, and for some reason Ryan’s eyes on his are too much, so he turns away.

  
~*~

  
Ryan doesn’t go with him. He tries to sleep again, but can’t. In the end, he just gets up, gets dressed, and gets the fuck out of there, pushing Shane’s keys into the pocket of his jacket — an unfamiliar weight. Shane had told him to make some coffee if he wanted it, but Ryan buys it instead, on his way to work.  
  
When he gets there, Shane’s seat is empty. He’s probably still at the shoot. And Ryan is kind of relieved. He places Shane’s keys on the desk, and then retreats — headphones on, video editing software up. The day goes on, he chats with Steven and Jen at lunch and soon he’s starting to feel a bit more like the world’s righted itself on its axis again.  
  
When Shane finally does come back, looking tired, Ryan feels normal enough to smile genuinely at him, the sound from a video still piping into his ears through his headphones. Until Shane touches the side of his neck as he passes behind him. The place where it meets his shoulder. It’s gone as quickly as it happened, but Ryan is already pulling his headphones off and around his neck, looking up at Shane as his heart stutters in his chest.  
  
“Thanks, Ryan,” Shane says, apparently perfectly oblivious, twirling his keys once around his fingers before catching them in a loose fist, and then he’s sitting down beside him, eyes already on his computer screen as it wakes up from sleep mode. The keys are slid into his pocket and Shane puts his headphones on and Ryan can’t think of anything to say, so he says nothing at all. After a moment, he pulls his own headphones back on, and gets back to work, the two of them sitting silently side by side.

  
~*~

  
The thing is, Shane thinks, it’s just much better to do things this way. Stay friends, keep it simple, not delve into territory where emotions run high. He and Ryan get enough of that. Or, at least, Ryan does. Ryan immerses himself in fear and wonderment while Shane stands back and watches and pretends it doesn’t just fucking fascinate him just as much as it frustrates him. The thing is, Ryan is braver than he is. As much as he literally jumps and screams at nothing out in all those supposedly haunted locations, startling Shane way more than any ghouls or spooks might, he is one of the bravest people Shane’s ever met.  
  
It feels like a bit of a disservice to withdraw from him, now, on the edge of whatever this is.  
  
But Shane has already stepped back. They both have, and Shane can sense it, in the way they both just work silently side by side, the way they chat about filming Postmortem tomorrow, like everything’s fine. And if they pretend hard enough, for long enough, eventually it really will be. That’s how relationships work. You just keep acting like normal and eventually things settle into place again. That’s what you do if you care about someone, you make sure things stay… steady.  
  
He knows, though, that Ryan is just following his lead. As ambitious as he is, as hard as he works on Unsolved, Shane knows that sometimes Ryan is just very _young_. There’s only four years between them, but there’s something… his defensiveness, maybe. His steadfast belief in ghosts and demons and his unwillingness to be told otherwise. And it’s in the fact that Shane knows if he changes his tone with enough conviction and finality, Ryan will just give in. At least on the surface. Shane knows this about him, and he knows he’s being incredibly unfair by taking away this opportunity for Ryan to be brave once again, but he just— he can’t do it, this time. Shane will follow him onto islands filled with spiders, and down the longest, darkest tunnels in any sanitarium. He will follow him into any fucking probably-not-haunted house, but he won’t— he just can’t let Ryan lead the way into that— whatever that was last night.  
  
Shane doesn’t want to go there. It’s too much. It’s way too big, and he can feel that, somehow, and it’s frightening. Way scarier than Ryan’s silly ghosts.  
  
So, Shane thinks, he can take this one thing for himself, can’t he? He can keep his walls up, this time. But it makes him wonder if he gets more out of this whole friendship than Ryan does, because Ryan has this way of… making him feel lighter. Shane tries not to think about this a lot, but this morning, the sun still coming up over the horizon as he walked to work, he couldn’t think of anything else.  
  
…It’s like when they were in that jacuzzi tub at the Dauphine. For Shane, the realization that the jets didn’t work had been weirdly upsetting. Sometimes things were just like that for him — too weighted, for no particular reason that he could see. So there they sat, in that not-so-spooky bathroom, especially when it was all lit up. And the jets didn’t work, and Shane had felt fucking sad about it, and it was ridiculous, frankly, until Ryan said it. _“The jets don’t work… we’re just two guys sitting in a tub.”_ And somehow that had just fixed everything. Shane had laughed, and it was better. And it was _that_ feeling, the negativity just swept away in that little moment… he only got that with Ryan.  
  
And Shane wonders, now, if he ever gives Ryan anything like that feeling, just something small and precious to hold onto.  
  
But Ryan laughs with everyone the way he laughs with Shane. And Shane picks on him and rolls his eyes at Ryan’s theories and… and maybe he is the kind of friend that Ryan can call in the middle of the night, if he needs him — he hopes Ryan knows that — but that doesn’t mean that he should be the kind of friend that Ryan looks at the way he did last night…  
  
He’d just been drunk, Shane reminds himself. He was spooked from the house, and drunk and tired… that was it.  
  
He returns to his apartment that evening, the keys feeling like they are burning a hole in his pocket until he unlocks the door and steps inside. He expects it to feel vaguely unfamiliar, after someone’s been here without him. Even if that someone was Ryan.  
  
The blanket is folded haphazardly on the couch but, otherwise, there is no sign that anyone else had been here at all. And for the first time… the place feels lonely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To be continued.
> 
> Also, wow, you guys. Thank you so much for reading and leaving kudos and commenting. Honestly, I've just been overwhelmed by how awesome you all are, and I really hope you continue to like this story!! It will probably be around 3 to 4 chapters in total, but we'll see how it goes. I hope to get it up fairly quickly, and since I didn't expect to be able to work on it today, I hope to have the third part (instead of the second) up by the end of the weekend, so wish me luck!


	3. Chapter 3

The static from the spirit box fills Ryan’s ears, but he’s not getting anything. He’s wandering the second floor of yet another house with evidence of hauntings — the last one for the season, and Shane’s somewhere downstairs. Probably, Ryan thinks, laughing at Ryan’s fear like an asshole.

__

And Ryan’s right. He is, until he hears something outside that makes him go quiet, head tilting slightly. The sound of footsteps on the front porch. The crew has gone back to the hotel, but maybe someone forgot something, Shane thinks.  
  
He and Ryan are supposed to spend the night here, and normally, they don’t wander around without the crew, but it was a decision between the two of them to film separately, now, Ryan suggesting that it was possibly the fact that there were always so many people around that they _supposedly_ never got any compelling readings on the spirit box. (He’d said this using the mocking voice he used when he pretended to be Shane, and Shane had looked at him completely unimpressed and mildly annoyed, until Ryan had said “Right, okay,” and jumped into action, grabbing the camera and the spirit box and preparing to head upstairs.)  
  
Did Shane think there were any ghosts here? No. Of course not. Still, there’s definitely a sound outside, and then the front door rattles. It’s locked, of course, because he and Ryan might be idiots, but they’re not _idiots_. Or rather, they’ll go into haunted places, but they aren’t about to leave the front door of a house unlocked in the middle of fuck-off nowhere in the Ozarks for _anyone_ to just come in and murder them while they sleep.  
  
Shane pushes away from the wall he’s leaning against and moves around the GoPro on its stand, leaving it filming the wall he’d been standing against while he moves to the front door. Yeah, it would be hilarious for Ryan to hear something like that old front door creak open, and Devon or TJ or someone and think it's a g-g-g-ghost voice, but in a moment of sincere kindness, Shane thinks of Ryan struggling through the editing process, and takes pity on him to save him from losing footage that might be ruined with someone else’s voice.  
  
Logically, Shane thinks, the only people that know they’re here are the curator of the house, Buzzfeed, and the crew. It’s probably not a murderer. _Razor boy!_ Shane thinks as he peers through the dusty, yellowing lace curtain to see who it is. He expects TJ, honestly. Expects to just open the door and hush him, say Ryan’s filming and find whatever Teege needs and then that’s that.  
  
The weird thing is, there’s nobody out there.

__

Upstairs as he films the rusted bathroom, still trying to get a response from something, Ryan’s flashlight goes out and he jumps, dropping the spirit box, still scanning rhythmically through channels. “Fuck,” he whispers, the sound lost, mostly, even to the mics beneath that heavy static, and he flicks the flashlight button and hits it against his palm to get it going, but it doesn’t turn on.  
  
“Nope, nope,” Ryan says, panic beginning to overwhelm his senses, because it is _very_ dark up here, and Shane’s somewhere downstairs and Ryan is alone. Or not alone, and that’s worse. _Fuck it,_ he thinks, and lunges for the wall to find the light switch. He can’t find it for perhaps three agonizing seconds, and then he does, slamming it on and— nothing.  
  
Then it flickers.  
  
“Oh, Jesus,” Ryan says, as the bulb attempts to flick on, but it’s fluorescent tubing or faulty wires and it’s struggling. For a moment there’s light —  blinding and white, the kind that makes you look like shit in airport bathrooms, and it is beautiful and safe, even as Ryan squints against it.  
  
In that split second, in the mirror, Ryan sees a figure pass the bathroom door behind him, then he’s plunged into darkness again as the lights go out, on, out, and then finally come properly to life.  
  
Ryan is frozen, barely breathing, eyes locked on the reflection, but there’s nothing out there, in the darkness of the hallway.

 _It’s Shane,_ he thinks, _fucking with me._  
  
“Shane, you dick!” Ryan shouts, and his voice shakes wildly. He moves out into the hallway hesitantly, fingers searching along the wall for the light switch up here, too, hoping desperately that something isn’t about to grab him, but there’s no one out here, on the landing.  
  
“Shane?” he whispers, hoping so fucking hard that Shane’s just going to emerge from the shadows of one of these doorways laughing like the fucking dick he is. But he doesn’t. The spirit box is still switching through channels behind him, but in terms of voices, it’s absolutely silent. Ryan can’t find the hall light. Somewhere in one of the darkened doorways, there’s a creak. “Ahh! _Shane_ fuck!” Ryan calls for him, desperate, terrified. He can barely fucking function. He _wants_ to get the fuck out of there, but his legs are shaking like he’s just going to sink down onto the floor and let whatever’s up here with him rip off his face or— Ryan fills his lungs with difficulty. “Shane, Shane!” It’s the only thing he can think to do.  
  
Shane is outside. Not far, just at the bottom of the porch steps. He’s holding the flashlight in his hand a little too hard, like maybe he might have to bean somebody with it, but there really is nobody around. _Okay, that’s fucking weird_ , he thinks, but he doesn’t think _ghost._ It's probably the kind of person who breaks into places like this and draws dicks on the walls, in which case, that’s annoying. And then he hears his name, shouted, but far away. Something in Ryan’s voice makes him feel a sudden drop in his stomach and Shane turns back to the house and takes the porch steps two at a time, pushing the door open.  
  
There’s a light on upstairs. That’s not like him. “Ryan?” he calls, then half laughs, but his heart isn’t in it. “You’re going to scare the ghosts away.”  
  
No response. He can hear the spirit box.  
  
“Ryan?”  
  
There’s a sound, scraping overhead, and then Ryan comes pelting down the stairs, half tripping at the bottom, and Shane moves as if to break the fall, but Ryan recovers, not even slowing down. “Fuck this fuck this,” he’s saying, and then he’s out the door.  
  
“Ry— shit,” Shane says, because if there is someone out there, maybe someone messing with them, that isn’t good. He goes after him.  
  
Ryan’s already at the car, going through his pockets and realizing he doesn’t have his keys. More languidly, cautiously, Shane follows. He has the presence of mind to close the front door, and is moving across the yard quietly. He’s listening for people. The woods stretch out all around them and Ryan’s breathing is all wrong and Shane reaches him. “What’s going on?” he asks, voice carefully neutral.  
  
“Dude, I saw— you were upstairs weren’t you? Please tell me you were upstairs.”  
  
“No, I was downstairs where I was supposed to be. I was filming, what happened?”  
  
“I dunno, man, I fucking saw someone.”  
  
Shane rolls his eyes a little. “It’s just your eyes, Ryan—”  
  
“ _No_ , Shane, it’s not just my eyes,” he says, and he’s just _shaking_. So hard Shane can see it, and he’s still not breathing right. He’s not looking at him, either.  
  
“Ryan,” Shane says, lower, more serious. “What the fuck? I need you to calm down, man. Just— let’s calm down.”  
  
Ryan’s vaguely incensed, beneath the fear, because Shane’s not freaking out at all, and he is, and it’s _always_ like this, and sometimes it’s just so fucking exhausting to be the only one— He leans against the car, his eyes on the house and then he looks at Shane and says, voice a little too cutting, “Where _were_ you?”  
  
“I just said I was downstairs—“ Shane says, defensively.  
  
“I fucking called for you— man, you _know_ how I get, that’s not fucking funny this time.”  
  
Shane shakes his head a little. “Ryan—“ He tries to think of how he can explain this without freaking Ryan out more. Somehow saying _I was outside because someone who’s not supposed to be here was trying to get into the house_ doesn’t seem like the right option. Ryan’s looking at him, and Shane realizes Ryan’s eyes are wet, and suddenly this is all kind of horrible.  
  
They look at one another for less than a second, but to Shane it feels like forever, and then Ryan looks away, one shaking hand wiping at his eyes. He’s tipped his head down so Shane can’t see his face anymore.  
  
“Why didn’t you at least answer me?” Ryan asks, and he’s _pissed_ now, but his voice still shakes and that combination makes Shane’s whole body feel tight. He looks back towards the house, checking, but he can’t see anyone. There’s still only one light on upstairs. He takes a step back from Ryan. “Like didn’t you hear that I was fucking _terrified_? Jesus, Shane. Is that funny to you?”  
  
“Oh come on—“ Shane says, but he doesn’t know how he’s going to defend himself. He does leave Ryan alone and freaking out in the dark. He does find it funny… but this time was different… “Look—“ Shane sighs. “Ryan, I didn’t hear you. I swear.”  
  
“Oh fuck off ‘you didn’t hear me’,”  
  
“O— okay, all right,” Shane says, getting irritated now, too. “Fine, Ryan, I heard you freaking out like you _always_ do—”  
  
“This was different!” Ryan shouts, and it’s too loud, it tears at his throat a little and Shane’s shoulders tighten against it.  
  
“Ryan,” he said, voice deceptively calm and quiet. “Shut up. I didn’t hear you because I was outside. Honestly. I thought I heard someone, like Devon or— I came to check, that’s why I didn’t hear you, all right? So calm the fuck down.”  
  
“What are you talking about?” Ryan asks, and his eyes are all wide and terrified and Shane shrugs like it’s nothing and says, “I dunno man, I heard the wind or something— rattle the door. I thought someone was here, so I came out to check.”  
  
“Dude.” Ryan says softly. “Haven’t you ever seen a horror movie?”  
  
Shane breathes a laugh. “I would have just run at any intruders like this—“ he says, and waves his arms about like the car-dealership balloon, and for the first time, Ryan relaxes a little. Shane even gets a smile from him.  
  
“Now can we go back inside?” Shane asks.  
  
“No, I— I don’t want to go back in there,” Ryan says.  
  
“Ryan, even if we leave, all our stuff’s still in there. We have to pack up the cameras. You need your little ghost box. Come on.”  
  
Ryan takes a second, then takes a deep breath. Nods. They go back.

~*~

Do they pack up, or don’t they? Shane’s standing in the middle of the room, seemingly completely carefree, waiting for Ryan to make the decision. Sometimes he hates being the one to make the decisions, here. He looks up and meets Shane’s eyes and swallows.  
  
“Okay… either way,” Shane says, “I have to turn that spirit box off before it drives me insane.” He makes for the stairs. Ryan feels his gut clench and follows on his heels. “Dude, be careful, seriously,” he tells him.  
  
“Whatever you saw up here was just your eyes,” Shane tells him as Ryan trails him up the creaking steps. He wants to stop, stay down here, but he follows Shane anyway like he might be able to do something if the ghost comes out to attack the big guy or something. Also, he doesn’t want to be alone again.  
  
“We’re never doing that again,” he says, just to hear himself talking, something familiar and normal. “No splitting up without the camera crew.”  
  
“What if we have to pee?” Shane asks, and he’s on the landing now and Ryan tries to follow, but can’t make his legs move up those last few steps. He clings to the wooden railing hard, watching as Shane stoops to pick up the spirit box and shut it off. They are plunged into silence so sudden that Ryan’s ears start ringing. “Should I turn this off, or?” Shane asks, indicating the bathroom light.  
  
Ryan swallows. “I mean we’ll eventually have to anyway… maybe we should leave it on tonight.”  
  
Shane shrugs.  
  
They look at each other. “You want to check the rooms?” Shane asks. “See if your ghostly apparition is still around?”  
  
“I swear I saw someone walk by the room,” Ryan says. “I know you don’t believe me, but like, what if it was a person or something? Be fucking _careful_ , Shane,” he says.  
  
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Shane tells him, voice infuriatingly nonchalant as he flicks on his own flashlight and holds it up. “Are we still filming or should we turn the lights on for this investigation?  
  
Ryan wants to turn the lights on. But he also wants compelling evidence. He takes a deep breath and climbs the last few stairs, moving closer to Shane. Shane turns, and starts checking the darkened rooms.  
  
“This is the stupidest thing anyone could do,” Ryan says. “Go upstairs where there’s no escape, when there might be someone in your house—”  
  
“It’s funny that you say that,” Shane says, and Ryan waits for him to continue. He can’t see his face, because Shane’s back is to him, and he’s scanning the room with the light. The silence stretches on and Ryan’s terror begins to build again. Like Shane might turn around and be possessed or like— have a different face or something.  
  
“Say what? Shane, Jesus Christ, _what_?”  
  
“Nothing,” Shane says, turning back to him. He motions with the light back into the hallway. “No one in here. Let’s try the next door. Door Number Two!” he says, in a gameshow host voice.  
  
Only Shane, Ryan thinks, could pretend this hell-hole is a game. Still, he does what he’s told.

~*~

“It’s funny that you say that,” Shane begins, and he’s about to tell him that he thinks maybe someone was fucking with them… but they’re probably fine. And Ryan’s going to think it’s ghosts and he just— he considers the fact that he’d like to sleep tonight, and not be kept up by Ryan having a crisis. Maybe he’ll tell him on the way back to the hotel or something. So they check the rest of the rooms, and Ryan’s sticking so close that Shane practically trips over him twice, and then finally takes Ryan’s shoulder and guides him a step or two away, saying “Okay, buddy, you’re fine.”  
  
They finish checking upstairs. Predictably, there’s nothing. Ryan’s calmer, so they shut the bathroom light off, and Shane follows Ryan back down.

~*~

Somehow, Ryan actually sleeps. It’s so sudden and so heavy, that it feels like he’s just blinked, only when he opens his eyes again, it’s much darker than it was and instead of being a barely distinguishable lump in a sleeping bag beside him, Shane’s sitting upright, staring into the hallway towards the door and it’s such a jarring transition, and the scene is so eerie, because Shane never hears or sees anything, that Ryan can’t do anything for a moment, as fear washes over him in a hot wave, setting all his nerves alight.  
  
Then he hears it. The front door rattles. Ryan immediately fumbles around his sleeping bag to find his flashlight, but Shane puts a hand out, somehow finding Ryan’s fingers in the dark and pressing them down against the floor. “Shh,” Shane whispers, “Don’t turn your light on.”  
  
For several long moments, Ryan can only hear his heartbeat pounding in his ears. Then he hears the porch boards creaking, and silence settles. Shane’s fingers are still over his. After what feels like a long time, Shane says, in a lilting, joking voice, “I think someone’s fucking with us, Ryan.”  
  
“ _What_?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
Ryan takes a second to let that horror settle in, and then asks, incredulous, “How are you not fucking scared right now? It’s like— three in the fucking morning, and something’s fucking with us?”  
  
“Some _one_ ,” Shane corrects, and Ryan actually feels Shane relax a little, and then his hand is drawn away.  
  
“What should we do?” Ryan asks.  
  
“Nothing,” Shane says. “It’s probably kids. The door’s lock—"  
  
There’s a heavy bang on the front door. Ryan probably screams, even if he can’t really hear himself over the roar of fear in his ears, and he’s up out of his sleeping bag. The fact that Shane’s on his feet too gives Ryan at least a little comfort.  
  
“What the fuck?” Shane murmurs. Silence falls once more. Somehow, to Ryan, it’s so much worse than actually hearing something. “This is fucked up,” he whispers.  
  
Shane doesn’t respond. Ryan looks back at him and whispers his name  
  
“Yeah, it’s a little weird,” Shane responds, suddenly, like he’s been kicked into action. “Should we check?”  
  
“Are you _fucking insane_?” Ryan asks.  
  
Shane shrugs, but it’s a little too tight to be casual. “This could be your proof of ghosts, Ryan, don’t you want to—“  
  
“Yeah or we could get fucking _shanked,_ ” Ryan hisses.  
  
“It’s probably kids or something—"  
  
“Ki— there’s no one around out here, we’re like miles from anything!”  
  
“Well—  that’s a bit of an exaggera—.” Shane cuts himself off. “Okay. Are we really going to do this right now?” he asks instead, annoyance in his voice, despite how quietly he’s speaking. “What do you want to do, Ryan?”  
  
“I want to get the fuck out of here.”  
  
“Somehow I feel like going _outside_ where the noise is coming from is not your brightest idea,” Shane says.  
  
Ryan raises his hands, and drops them to his sides in a helpless gesture. “I dunno, then, Shane what do you want to do?” he asks, feeling a little breathless.  
  
“Look, let’s…” Shane is saying, pulling out his cellphone. Finally, there’s light, even if it doesn’t illuminate much, and Ryan calms a little.  
  
“I’m going to call the others.” Shane says, sitting down on top of his sleeping bag, already going through his contacts. He meets Ryan’s eyes as he raises the phone to his ear, an it illuminates his face oddly. Ryan crouches down on his own sleeping bag, watching him. The phone rings and rings but no one answers.  
  
Shane hangs up.  
  
“Oh God. Oh God, this is like a fucking horror movie, oh Jesus,” Ryan says, getting to his feet, fingers in his hair, pacing.  
  
“Ryan, man, calm down,” Shane says in a voice that is on the edge of something that might be laughter.  
  
“No— no way, man, you gotta admit that this is fucking weird.”  
  
“ _Yes_ , it’s weird,” Shane says, “But freaking out isn’t going to help anything.” The light on his phone screen goes out and they’re in the dark again. Ryan takes in a breath that doesn’t fill his lungs, and then he’s struggling. He feels like he can’t breathe in or out. Shane taps his phone screen back to life. “Ryan— stop. Hey— hey, Ryan,” he says, and his voice has gotten a little more urgent, even though it’s still quiet. “Ryan— just breathe, okay?”  
  
Ryan is nodding, but he’s still not breathing right. Somewhere in his mind he wonders if ghosts can strangle people and then his mind just kind of shuts down as he thinks _Oh God, I’m gonna die_.

~*~

The phone goes dark. Shane presses it on again. They have about sixty seconds. In that little window of time, he crosses to the other man and catches his shoulders and bends slightly, awkwardly to meet his eyes. “Ryan, hey— _calm down_.” Ryan’s meets his eyes. “Breathe,” Shane laughs a little, but it’s not funny. He can feel his own little bubble of panic in his chest. “Are you breathing?”  
  
Nothing, Ryan’s just looking at him like a terrified animal. It freaks Shane out way more than the sounds outside. The phone light goes out.  
  
“Okay,” he says. “ _Ohh-_ kay, _oh-_ kay.” He doesn’t know what the fuck else to do, so he pulls Ryan into his chest and hopes that the sounds outside don’t come back because he thinks Ryan might really have a heart attack. Shane feels Ryan’s fingers come up to his waist and hold on _hard_ and it actually fucking really hurts and Shane breathes a laugh but doesn’t try to push him away, even though that grip is vice-like, he just wraps long limbs around Ryan’s smaller frame. Shane is trying to find a place where he fits, where he’s holding him securely enough to make him feel just a little protected, and for a couple seconds it’s awkward. His limbs are too long and Ryan is stiff and unpliant against him. His fingers end up below one of Ryan’s shoulderblades, and in Ryan’s hair and he strokes it a little. “Seriously, Ryan, you need to breathe, I’m not gonna give you mouth to mouth.”  
  
There’s a sound and a hot breath somewhere below Shane’s collarbone as Ryan maybe laughs or maybe sobs, but at least it’s breathing. His body relaxes a little against Shane’s and suddenly it’s not so awkward anymore. Suddenly they’ve slipped like puzzle pieces into place.  
  
“Good.” Shane says, absurdly, beneath the sudden skip-jump of his own heart. “Good job.”  
  
He doesn’t know how long they stand like that, but it’s a while just listening to Ryan breathing shakily in and out… but then Ryan pulls away. It feels cold without him. “I gotta get out of here. I want to leave.”  
  
Shane just opens his hands in a helpless gesture. “Okay, let’s go,” he says, and he hopes they don’t actually get shanked on the way to Ryan’s car. “Make sure you have your keys this time.”  
  
They pack up fast, and get the fuck out. The curator had given them a key to be returned after filming and Shane locks up, and they both walk a little too quickly across the front yard to the car, loading everything up haphazardly before they get in, pulling the doors shut. Ryan starts the engine, and Shane has to laugh at the little breath of relief Ryan exhales.  
  
They’re quiet until they reach the main road again. Ryan finally stops checking the rearview like something might be following them.  
  
“Well… that’s going to be embarrassing to put in the ep,” Shane says, and his voice boarders on too bright for the kind of night they’ve had.  
  
Ryan suddenly laughs, glancing over at him. It bubbles up into genuine hilarity until Shane has to shout, playfully, “Watch the road! Jesus, Ryan!” and somehow things have turned out all right.  
  
Still, it’s a relief to get to the hotel, to shut the door to a room where the two beds, and the mini fridge, and the hotel notepaper, and the squishy armchair in the corner speak of absolute normality.  
  
Ryan immediately goes to shower, like he can wash that fear off of him. Shane sits on one of the beds with his phone and scrolls through Twitter, staring at it absently. His eyes flicker to the bathroom door, to the two beds, and he thinks that he shouldn’t have wrapped his arms around Ryan like that because now he knows what it’s like to feel that. And he sort of wishes he didn’t, because now it feels like he’s lost something.  
  
The water in the bathroom shuts off.  
  
Shane drops his phone onto the mattress and rubs his hands over his face and remembers exactly the tone and cadence of Ryan’s voice when he had asked him, weeks ago, _“What are you doing to_ me _?”_  
  
And, Shane thinks, he can tell himself all he wants that he doesn’t want to be doing _anything_ to Ryan… that he really does think they should just stay friends, keep things simple... but it would be a lie.  
  
Outside, the sky is just beginning to get light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To be continued (still)
> 
> Huge thanks to the folks who have left comments and kudos, it really means so much to me. I've really missed the fanfic community, and you've all made it really lovely and incredible to come back and write something that's actually multi-chaptered for the first time in what feels like forever. Thank you so much, seriously.


	4. Chapter 4

Neither of them sleep. They try, or pretend to, but Ryan has had Shane fall asleep next to him too many times to know that he’s not breathing the way he does when he’s truly sleeping. Still, they are silent until it’s time to get up and head to the airport.  
  
“What do you think that was?” Ryan asks Shane just before they go out to meet the others in the lobby, and Shane’s brown eyes meet his as he pulls a sweater out of his bag.  
  
“I dunno, Ryan,” Shane tells him, shaking his head a little. “Don’t worry about it. It’s over now.”  
  
But Ryan does.  
  
They tell the others what shit went down at that house, but neither of them mentions Ryan’s panic attack, or what followed. The crew’s a little spooked, but mostly perplexed, and they let the curator know when they drop the key off that there might be some up-to-no-good types about.  
  
_Assuming_ , Ryan thinks, _it_ is _just kids._  
  
He finally manages to get some sleep on the plane, and once they are back in Los Angeles, it’s a huge relief to get back to things that feel friendly and familiar. Ryan’s car waits at the airport instead of the similar-looking rental he’d used in Oklahoma, and it’s such a relief somehow, to see it, that he’s not even mad about paying a fortune for parking. Because his car gets him to well-known streets and landmarks, and eventually to his own apartment where, hopefully, nothing’s followed him back.  
  
_Oh_ , Ryan thinks, because this particular horrible thought has somehow not occurred to him yet. _Shit._  
  
This is where they normally split up. Ryan will take Devon home and Shane will catch a ride with the guys. It’s what they do every time they come back to L.A., after one of their Unsolved trips, so Ryan doesn’t expect anything different. He’s just sliding into the driver’s seat when he hears Shane say, “Actually guys, you go without me. Yeah, yeah, I’m good.”  
  
Ryan watches Shane lope back across the parking lot to him, his fingers just lightly brushing the roof of Ryan’s car. There’s a pause — just long enough for Devon to notice and look between them curiously. “I thought I’d go with you, if that’s all right,” Shane says.  
  
“Oh,” says Ryan. In his head, he’s thinking _Wait, what? Why?_ “Yeah, sure.”  
  
Shane climbs into the back and Devon pulls her seat up. “Slide over,” she tells Shane. “I have lots of room,” and Shane slides across Ryan’s back seat to sit behind her, buckles himself in. “Let’s go, buckaroos,” he says, clapping his hands together and rubbing his palms.  
  
Ryan has to laugh. “You have _way_ too much energy for the night, and the amount of sleep, we just had.”  
  
All at once, it feels normal. They drop Devon off; Shane lives past Ryan, closer to work. “Home?” Ryan asks him, glancing at him in the rearview. He’s still sitting in the back, and Ryan suddenly feels like a cab driver.  
  
“Your place is fine,” Shane says. Like that’s totally normal.  
  
“Oh, so now you’re just inviting yourself,” Ryan jokes.  
   
“Actually Ryan,” Shane quips, pretending to be offended. “I thought you might want the company. I know how you get after these ghoulish adventures.”  
  
Ryan is suddenly, overwhelmingly filled with gratitude and relief. At least if something did follow them back, they’ll be able to combat it with Shane’s absolute pig-headed skepticism, that’s enough to drive anything away. And he should say thank you. That’s how he was raised, after all. But what he says is, “Shut up, Shane,” and Shane laughs, moves, and suddenly he’s sliding into the seat beside Ryan. “Let’s go!” he says, still with entirely too much exuberance.  
  
Ryan shakes his head as he pulls back out onto the street, mumbling something about “There’s something seriously wrong with you,”  but he’s smiling. And so, they’re on their way.

—

All that pep was just for show, apparently, because Shane somehow manages to fold his lanky self up onto three quarters of Ryan’s sofa within an hour and a half of getting to his apartment, and that’s where he falls asleep. Ryan, sitting on the other quarter, switches the TV off and uses the time to pull up the files from the cameras and starts going through what they filmed. He’s wearing headphones so that he doesn’t disturb Shane, and he wonders vaguely how long Shane’s going to sleep, and whether it’s okay if he just stays here the night for no real reason at all, or if it’s weird that Ryan wants him to.  
  
The stuff they filmed this time makes for a weird watch. Lots of empty footage — probably while Shane was out checking the yard. Still, it spooks him a little. He speeds it up a little through the parts where they’re both asleep, but then, he stops the footage and goes back to watch the part again, where the door rattling woke Shane. It’s still fucking creepy.  
  
He watches Shane sit up, watches as the timestamp counts two minutes, then three. How the hell does Shane not freak out, just sitting up alone in the dark like that? He doesn’t even reach for Ryan like Ryan would have done for him, but Ryan always reaches out for Shane when he’s terrified.  
  
A few months ago, he would have wondered why he did that, but now…  
  
Ryan watches himself get swallowed up by fear, pacing the room, his eyes glowing weirdly in the night vision. He realizes, suddenly, that this part was what he was waiting for, why he skipped over so much footage that might have good banter between the two of them, why he’s not even bothering with the EVP… he’s been waiting to get here. He’s not searching for ghosts this time, but this. This moment where Shane stands up and comes over, and just sort of folds himself around Ryan in the dark.  
  
He’s barely breathing as he watches it, but it’s so, so different from the drowning feeling he had in that house. _God,_ he thinks, _I want—_  
  
Shane shifts, and his socked foot hits the outside of Ryan’s thigh. He can hear Shane say something, but not clearly, so he pulls the headphones down around his neck as he looks over. “Huh?”  
  
“Anything good?” Shane asks him, a little too sleepily.  
  
“Uh, no… Nothing yet.”  
  
Shane sits up, rubbing his face. There’s a weird little spot of reddened skin near his cheekbone where it had been pressed against the arm of the couch. His gaze fall to the screen where the footage is still running, where they’re still standing there, holding onto each other.  
  
Shane swallows, eyes on the screen. As he watches, he remembers, again, what it felt like to hold onto him. His eyes flicker to Ryan, the real one, the one sitting just next to him and watching the screen with thoughtful intensity. Somehow, this Ryan seems hundreds of miles away. Much further away than the one in Shane’s arms onscreen. Just to break the silence, Shane says “I shouldn’t have slept with my contacts in… How long was I out?”  
  
“Maybe like an hour,” Ryan estimates. Maybe it’s because they can’t look at each other, that they both watch the footage instead, their faces lit by the greenish light of the night vision camera through Ryan’s laptop screen. Shane’s just about to ask, curiously, if Ryan’s going to keep it in the final cut of the video, but then Ryan takes this deep breath and holds it a second too long, and Shane somehow knows to keep quiet.  
  
“I… went to a gay bar.”  
  
Shane’s face rearranges into an expression of mild confusion. Has he missed something?  
  
“A month ago, I thought— _oh shit, what if I’m gay?_ So I went to a gay bar.”  
  
“Uh,” Shane says, and Ryan’s heart _clenches_. Shane snorts a little, then wheezes with laughter, and Ryan lets out a half-genuine, half-formed laugh of his own.  
  
“Ryan,” Shane manages, “What’s happening?”  
  
“I have no fucking idea,” Ryan says, and his voice boarders on the edge of breathless hysteria. He _wants_ to be laughing at this.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Shane says, trying to regain control of himself. “I just wasn’t prepared for you to come out with that. Or— shit, wait. _Are_ you coming out? You’re not coming out to me right now, are you?” They’re going to have to backtrack if that’s the case.  
  
“No. I dunno. I don’t think so. I mean— does that matter?”  
  
“It doesn’t matter to me,” Shane says. “I don’t care.”  
  
On the laptop, they’ve broken apart and have started packing up. Onscreen-Ryan reaches for the camera, and the footage ends.

~*~

Without something to watch in front of them, Shane wonders where, exactly, this conversation is going, and what he should be doing with this information. “Does it matter to _you_?” he finally asks in the silence that follows.  
  
Ryan’s quiet for a second. “No. It’s like…” he leans forward, rewinds the footage, busies himself by attaching the EVP file properly to the video so the timestamps line up. Shane waits, he can see the conflict in Ryan’s face, but it’s a long time before Ryan speaks again. When he does, he says “I was thinking about the Dowsing Rods,” and Shane has to try to wrangle his mind around to this ridiculous train of thought.  
  
“Oh. Okay. Were you thinking about how they’re absolute _horse shit_?”  
  
“No, I mean— I was thinking about how maybe they just seem like horse shit, and didn’t work in Pennhurst because I taped them to the shelf. Like… maybe they actually need energy to work, human energy, right? If there’s nothing for the ghosts to use to push energy through the rods, or if there’s nothing they can manipulate, then it stands to reason that maybe taping them to the shelf wouldn’t be effective.”  
  
Shane blinks, looking thoroughly nonplussed, as he tries to figure out what is actually happening in this conversation. Why are they talking about fucking Dowsing Rods, now?

“Ryan,” he says, “ _what the fuck_?”  
  
“And lately,” Ryan pushes onward, raising his voice just a little to speak over him, “I’ve just been trying to fucking figure all this out, because I feel like I keep going to these haunted places, or whatever, maybe looking for something that I keep thinking is there, because sometimes I’m so sure it _is_ —” he’s not looking at Shane, but his shoulders are tight, and Shane watches his jaw tighten as he swallows. “And then when it turns out that I guess I haven’t really found anything at all…”  
  
And Shane knows, suddenly, that they’re not actually talking about ghosts. That they are finally addressing what he has been wondering about for so long. There are no answers yet, but here it is, and maybe he and Ryan have both been on the same page this whole time without knowing it. He really fucking hopes so. He hopes so _so_ desperately, even at the same time as he feels that old, familiar fear beginning to wrap around his chest, and squeeze.  
  
“What are you looking for?” he asks, very soft.  
  
Ryan makes a sound like the beginning of a word, then just opens his hands to the ceiling in a helpless shrug, because he’s really not sure, or he’s not ready to be.  
  
But Shane feels like he gets what that means, somehow. Or maybe he doesn’t. Maybe they’ve just been living in this negative space for too long, skirting around the unknown centre of whatever this is.  
  
Shane wraps the fingers of one hand around the edge of the couch tightly and realizes that this is all him, now. The ball is in his court, so to speak, and he thinks _Ah, fuck._ He’s not ready.

~*~

Shane shifts. Ryan expected this: for Shane to take a graceful step back, change the subject, guide them into less choppy waters where they are both safe. And separate. He feels the disappointment and the flicker of anger, like heat, because, man, he just _put himself out there_ , and he debates on whether he should call Shane on that, or not.  
  
“Okay, I—” Shane begins, voice soft and uncertain, and Ryan can’t even look at him. “I’m just gonna…” His fingers brush the side of Ryan’s jaw and, suddenly, Shane is kissing him, and it takes Ryan’s mind a moment to catch up.  
  
It’s one of the most terrifying things Shane has ever done, and it’s far from perfect. He’s leaning his long, lanky frame across too much space in order to reach Ryan. _I should have planned this better_ , he thinks, because he’s all angles, bracing his elbow against the back of the couch, fingers still on Ryan’s face. It hurts his back a little, and Ryan is very still, and Shane’s gut starts to feel icy. He’s just about to pull back and apologize for being presumptuous, or worse, maybe he _wildly_ miscalculated, but all of a sudden Ryan makes this little sound, twisting into him. And then his mouth opens beneath Shane’s, and that’s all it takes to give in.  
  
Shane exhales a small, overwhelmed breath that Ryan feels against his mouth and then they do separate a little, too soon. And fuck, there’s this _ache_ left behind as Shane pulls his hand away from Ryan’s face, and braces his forearm against the back of the couch instead. He’s not looking at him.  
  
Ryan doesn’t even have time to think the whole thought: _So that’s it, it’s over before it started_ , before Shane is moving closer to him, his long legs tangling slightly as he finally figures out where to place his other hand. The backs of his knuckles slide over Ryan’s cheekbone to his ear and for a second they actually look at each other, and then Shane unfurls his fingers into Ryan’s dark hair and kisses him again, properly, better.  
  
But Shane can feel the edge of Ryan’s laptop digging into the space just beneath his ribs and it’s painful and distracting, but Ryan’s mouth is warm and sweet, and there is something so tentative, so quietly desperate about this kiss that he didn’t expect. And then Ryan’s tongue slides against his in this _purposeful_ way and Shane feels his stomach flip over with want and he pulls away again, breathless, and says “Okay—”  
  
“Oh, Jesus Christ, Shane—” Ryan breathes, like he can’t handle that separation, or Shane changing his mind _now_. But Shane reaches out and takes the headphones from around Ryan’s neck, gently, two handed, and Ryan just watches him, quiet, uncertain, as he places them, and Ryan’s laptop, on the floor before straightening back up. They both hesitate.  
  
“I think we were, ah, in the middle of something,” Shane says, waving one hand between them, absently, “before your computer tried to impale me. So I removed it. I’ve removed it, now.”  
  
“You’re fucking insane,” Ryan says, and there’s a smile in his eyes, and his voice soft and pitched a little too high, and then he closes his fingers in the collar of Shane’s shirt, and pulls him close to kiss him again.  
  
And maybe it’s reckless, but it doesn’t _feel_ like that, Ryan thinks, as Shane’s fingers slide warmly over his ribs through his t-shirt to tug him closer almost imperceptibly. It feels like finding proof of ghosts. Like he’s discovered the truth of something that is equally terrifying and exhilarating.

~*~

It’s when he notices that Ryan’s shaking that Shane draws away, but the easy casual _you okay, man?_ doesn’t come out. “Uh, you’re—”  
  
“Yeah,” Ryan says, looking at his unsteady hands. He meets Shane’s eyes. “I don’t know why. This is just a—”  
  
“It’s a lot,” Shane finishes, drawing back.  
  
Ryan tenses a little because that wasn’t what he meant. “Too much for you, big guy?” he asks, and it’s too bold, Shane thinks, for how hard he’s shaking, but Ryan holds his ground, anyway.  
  
Shane gives him a soft breath of a laugh. “Maybe,” he says, and then he pulls back, making definitive space between them. Ryan’s eyes are searching.  
  
“Don’t look at me like that, please,” Shane says.  
  
“I’m not looking at you like anything, I’m just— what’re we doing, here?”  
  
Shane shakes his head a little, and looks away. “Dunno, Ryan… I dunno.”  
  
“Well, I mean…” Ryan stutters a little, and then asks, “Didn’t you think it was nice? _I_ thought it was—…”  
  
“ _Yeah_ , it was _nice_ —,” Shane says, his voice beginning to boarder on upset now, on frustration. “It was nice, it was—” he can’t find the right word. Nice is the understatement of the century, and he gestures expressively with his hands to express this thing, this fucking impossible thing to explain. “But it’s—” he shakes his head. “Yeah, it’s a lot. It’s a lot for right now.”

~*~

Ryan’s quiet, chewing his lip, watching, waiting. He watches Shane get increasingly uncomfortable but he doesn’t relent.  “Why is it ‘a lot’?” Ryan finally asks.  
  
“Oh, come on, Ryan,” Shane says, and somehow it’s not too harsh. He meets Ryan’s eyes, and that says everything. They’re friends, they work together on more than one project… Mostly, they’re friends. And Ryan gets it. He nods and looks away. “So what now?” he asks.  
  
Shane leans back against the back of the couch, both hands pressing into his eyes. “Now?” he repeats. “I don’t know.”  
  
Ryan presses his lips together, his eyes on the floor. “But we’re okay. Right?”  
  
“Yeah,” Shane says, looking at him again, and Ryan looks so freaked out. Shane nudges Ryan’s leg with his knee until Ryan looks up at him, and, with conviction, he says “Yeah, Ryan, we’re okay.”  
  
Ryan exhales relief.  
  
“But I should… maybe I should go,” Shane says, “Before it gets awkward or something.”  
  
“If you want,” Ryan tells him, but his heart’s definitely not in it. Shane digs his phone out anyway, sends for an Uber, and they’re quiet. And then, all at once, Ryan is watching him get up, dragging his fingers through his hair, even more wild now than usual, because Ryan’s fingers have been tangled in it. Suddenly he feels sort of like crying.  
  
“Text me,” Shane is saying, “If you find any ghostly happenings in the footage. I wanna be the first to know.”  
  
“You’re always the first to know,” Ryan says, and it comes out a little bit more hurt than he meant it to.  
  
Shane stills, pulling his jacket on. There’s a pause and then he shrugs it up over his shoulders. “Ryan…” he says, soft, “Please, let’s… not make this A Thing.”  
  
“A Thing,” Ryan repeats. “Yeah, no. Of course not.”  
  
It really doesn’t take long at all for the Uber to get there. He trails Shane to the main lobby to see him out because it feels too awful just sitting in his apartment while Shane leaves, but the whole thing feels oddly formal. “See you,” Shane says, softly, then pushes the door open to the street, and the waiting car out front.  
  
Ryan can’t breathe right as Shane steps outside into the night.  
  
“Please don’t,”  
  
Ryan hears himself say it, and Shane turns back. “Please don’t just go like that. You should just stay. On the couch, whatever. I don’t care. Just don’t go right now.”

~*~

Shane holds Ryan’s eyes, suspended on the threshold of the doorway. He is half in shadows, and the car headlights that beckons him to the safety and solitude of his own apartment are waiting for him at the end of the walk, and here, lit by the lobby’s warm yellow light, Ryan is begging him to stay.  
  
“Ryan—” Shane says, like a warning, or a plea. His eyes flicker between the other man’s, and they are both holding the lobby door open. For a moment. And then Shane turns away, jogs to the car. Ryan watches him, waits. He doesn’t know why he’s waiting, because he should he fucking angry. And yet…  
  
Shane bends to speak to the driver through the car window, and Ryan hears him apologize, and then he’s back, his boots scraping softly over the concrete step. He stops at the entrance like a vampire waiting to be invited in. Behind him, the Uber drives off and they are left looking at one another.  
  
Suddenly Ryan smiles at him, brilliantly, Shane thinks, beautifully. “This is definitely the better choice,” Ryan says. “Good work, sir.”  
  
“Thank you,” Shane answers automatically.  
  
Ryan turns away, leading the way back to his own apartment. He glances over his shoulder at Shane as he goes. “Because otherwise, I probably would have wanted to kill you.”  
  
“Uh oh,” Shane says, voice slipping into that lilting playfulness even as he stands in the doorway, unmoving. “That would have spoiled a perfectly decent Wednesday morning.” He is rewarded when Ryan begins to laugh, hard and genuine, and it echoes a little off the empty lobby walls.  
  
Shane looks away so that he can catch his breath, even as he feels his face break into smile. And this time, without hesitating, he steps forward into the light, and follows Ryan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story continues in "How do you ruin me?", part two of the "I love your bones" series, if you're so inclined!
> 
> ~*~
> 
> Also, last but not least, HUGE thank you to each and every person who read this and left kudos or commented. Like whoa, you guys have really inspired me and made me feel so happy, I cannot CANNOT thank you enough. <3 So much love for you all!
> 
> Also, thanks to my incredible partner in life and in crime who beta'd this for me even though he doesn't ship it.


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